Favourite Lessons From 'A Course In Miracles'

I felt like this was a good time to bring back a couple of posts I wrote on A Course in Miracles in 2024 on my old blog. This is the first one, which summarizes a few of the key lessons.

A Course in Miracles (ACIM) had been on my radar ever since I first read listened to Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of ‘A Course in Miracles.’ At that time and the years after, I had no desire to check out the original source, but as the saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Perhaps I was desperate for miracles to happen because after I had watched one of Eckhart Tolle’s YouTube videos on ACIM, I was intuitively called to get a copy of the book and embark on the Course.

I would describe ACIM as a “New Age Bible.” Channelled and recorded word-by-word by Columbia University psychology professor Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1972, with the help of her colleague William Thetford, the Course is taught by a narrator Schucman recognized as Jesus. For me, knowing that this mystic information was born in an academic setting was already a miracle since I had been frustrated with academia’s reluctance to embrace spirituality. I had been increasingly intuiting the operations of guilt in institutions and I had started to use the term "the innocence of knowledge" without fully knowing why. But after reading ACIM, many of my obscure philosophies began to make more sense.

I have yet to master my miracle-working abilities, but I was surprised that many of the Course's teachings were lessons that I had been working through in such abstract forms that my mind didn’t even fully understand. In this post, I’ll share core lessons of the Course that resonated with me and in the next post, I'll write about some diversions I have with the material.

1. The authority problem and the source of all evil: to erroneously believe that we are the author of ourselves (i.e., to identify with the ego)

ACIM teaches us that souls are given authorship from God (or whatever name you want to call the ultimate divine power). To deny otherwise is to choose the ego as the authority which comes with all the errors in our perceptions of the world. This lesson certainly triggers my ego who wants to believe that I can change myself all by myself and change the world with me. Despite often forgetting the futility of this error, I have learned through experience to know the importance of this humbling lesson.

2. The foundation of the ego’s world is guilt

The ego is the result of the illusion of separation. The ego creates judgement and attacks others (or themselves) with it to maintain this separation. Those who do not attack are the ego’s enemies because they have a better chance of letting it go. Therefore, to release guilt is to release the ego. To the ego, the guiltless are guilty. If you pay attention, you may be surprised at how often you do something (or not do something) to avoid guilt. You'd also notice how much our society operates through guilt.

3. Forgiveness is to let go of the ego’s judgement and to allow for divine atonement

Forgiveness is to correct the ego’s errors. The power within forgiveness is that it requires divine intervention. We can’t will our way into forgiving. We can only allow it to happen by temporarily suspending the ego's stories. The Course calls this the Holy Instant when we surrender the projection of guilt to the Holy Spirit. In simple terms, it means surrendering our attachment to the pain caused by judgment to a larger universal power in a moment of complete presence.

In ACIM, the Last Judgment is God’s final verdict of our holiness, which is always a positive verdict when we surrender. However, the practical me likes to think of the Last Judgment as the last judgment that the ego gets to make before it dies! According to the Course, behind a person’s actions is only one of two operations: to love or to call for love. When we come against attacks, it means it’s time for less judgment, more surrendering, and more loving (even if the recipient is only ourselves).

As I’ve been tricked by my ego many times, I like to keep this reminder close at bay: if we are frustrated by someone else’s identification with their ego, that is, their attachment to guilt, fear, projection, and attack, then it is because we have not completely forgiven ourselves.

4. Knowledge is certainty; all else is perception

A while back, I wrote a blog article exploring why academia is a disempowering place despite the notion that knowledge is power. After studying ACIM, I have an even clearer understanding of why. It is because our guilt-based world has inverted the truth about knowledge.

We seek knowledge, usually through empirical means, to convince ourselves that what we know is certain. But the reality is all that we seek to know is just a matter of perception. According to ACIM, knowledge is always true and truth does not need to be proven. Since the opposite of guilt is innocence (in the rulings of the court), true knowledge that is ego-less (and therefore, guilt-free) is always innocent.

5. We learn what we teach

In ACIM, we are simultaneously students and teachers. Since our perception has not reached the level of truth, we come closer to knowledge through experience. We teach by example and simultaneously learn by living and teaching what we want to acquire. As the Course notes, “To have peace, teach peace to learn it.”

Another way I interpret this is through Heidegger's explanation of truth being a process of unconcealing. As human beings, we forget the spiritual truth we "know" when we are "thrown into" the world, so we embark on a journey of unconcealing the layers that veil the essence of our Being.

6. True empathy is not a joining of suffering

ACIM explains that to share suffering is to follow the ego’s path of separation. Joining another in suffering creates a special relationship that separates itself from the whole. This strengthens the ego and makes the past real as the shared unit attacks "others" in their weakness. True empathy, on the other hand, strengthens the empathizer and the collective whole (because we are one of the same). This empathy does not judge through the ego, and therefore, is an invitation made by Spirit to respond to a situation in a certain way.

As an empath, this lesson is encouraging but challenging. In a world of injustice, it's difficult to choose to stand in the awareness that "sovereignty" is more loving and empowering than "solidarity." Not only do we feel the pain, we are constantly asked to join in the suffering to prove our empathy or else risk being attacked with the sufferer's projected guilt. But this is the test of our knowledge: we know we are guilt-free and our act of service will manifest in our lives when we surrender.

7. There is no order of difficulty in miracles

On April 8, 2024, I had plans to see the Great North American Eclipse with a friend in the Hamilton area. Just as I was making my way onto the packed commuter train from Toronto, my friend texted me to ask if I wanted to abort mission because of the heavy clouds. I texted back to say that I wanted to take the chance. When I reached our meet up location, the sky was still completely overcast. Yet, something in me knew that we were going to see the eclipse (even if my mind couldn’t predict the future).

I didn’t tell my friend about my intuitive premonition, but I told her that I had recently finished reading ACIM and there was no order of difficulty in miracles. Low and behold, by the time we reached our destination, a place serendipitously called Groundhog Hill, the sky had completely cleared up and we were able to see our shadows under a sun that was beginning to be eclipsed by the moon.

I love the memory of this story because it is fuel for the dreamer in me. It reminds that there is really no miracle too large to witness. If the clouds can be moved out of the way for us to witness the miracle of a cosmic event, who is to say that a stubborn mind cannot be budged, or a locked-up heart cannot be freed? As ACIM says, “all expressions of love are maximal...There is no order of difficulty among miracles.”